


Soul to Soul

by Temaris



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, Happy Ending, M/M, Masturbation, Mutual Masturbation, Sickness, Soulmates, tw: overdose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-08 16:07:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6862318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Temaris/pseuds/Temaris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's late June, 2009, and Eric Bittle is barely two months past fourteen, when he wakes up, choking, his heart stuttering in his chest.  He drags in a breath, and it rattles through his throat, floods his lungs, as welcome as though he's not breathed in minutes. His throat burns, raw as though he's been puking for an hour.  </p><p>Something is *wrong*.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started thinking about soul mates, and then I started thinking about Jack’s overdose, and then this happened. I'm so sorry.

It's late June, 2009, and Eric Bittle is barely two months past fourteen, when he wakes up, choking, his heart stuttering in his chest. He drags in a breath, and it rattles through his throat, floods his lungs, as welcome as though he's not breathed in minutes. His throat burns, raw as though he's been puking for an hour. 

Something is *wrong*.

He flails at the light switch, knocks his bottle of water off onto the floor, and drags himself up, sitting, blinking blearily at the too bright light, still coughing wildly, hauling in breath after breath, as though it's the only way that he will keep breathing, if he wills it. Tears are streaming down his face, and all he can think is, water, he needs his water. He leans over to reach for it, but compressing his chest sets off another round of hacking splutters, and he sits back up, closes his eyes, tries to get his breathing back under control. 

His door opens, and his Mama slips in, robe loosely tied over her pajamas.

"You okay, Dicky?" she whispers. She takes everything in, scoops up the water bottle, opens and holds it to his lips. "Here you go, honey," she says. He takes a long series of gulps. "You finish that, honey, and I'll get you something warm. You need anything, Dicky?"

"No, Mama," he rasps out. He takes another sip of water, It slides easily down his throat, but doesn't seem to soothe or reach the tightness.

"Well, I'll get you a hot drink, and maybe some benadryl would help. Can’t hurt," she says, and he listens to her go down the stairs. She rattles around in the kitchen, the sounds amplified by the late hour and the utter silence of the rest of the world. He breathes slowly, steadily. Each one feels like he’s dragging something -- someone -- along with him. As though if he lets his grip loosen for a second, the world -- his world -- will end.

"Hold on," he whispers. "Hold on."

He's not entirely sure who he's talking to. But he's afraid he knows. He's very afraid.

"Please. Just a little longer. If I don't get to meet you, I'm never going to forgive you, darlin'."

"Who're you talking to, Dicky? Here, take this, it’ll help," his Mama says. The bed dips as she settles on beside him, she hands him a hot cocoa, takes a sip of her own. She touches his forehead with the back of her hand, frowning a little. "You don't feel hot."

“I'm fine, Mama," he says. His voice cracks mid-word and he flushes, buries his face in his drink. It's not that long since his voice settled, shifting slowly from a boyish treble to a soft tenor that didn't make anyone stop using slurs to talk about him.

"Honey," she says gently. He slides a glance at her, and she's just watching, no judgement, no words, just waiting. 

"I don't think it's me," he blurts out. "I don't think I'm the one that's sick."

Her free hand flies to her mouth. "Oh honey." He doesn't really need to explain more than that. She's known he's had a soulmate somewhere in the world since his first word, at nearly eight months old was 'Jack'. It's perhaps a superstition, there's no scientific proof of the old wives tale. But there are far too many people she knows, too many stories she's heard all her life, to dismiss it. They don't know any 'Jacks'. He'd not been allowed to watch tv. 

Eric starts crying again, tears sliding silently down his face. "He's dying, Mama."

She wraps both arms around him. "You know better than that," she whispers.

"I know," he says back, and they wait like that, in silence.

He takes a deep breath at almost four am. Opens his eyes. The night is fading into the greys of pre-dawn, and his Mama's arm tightens around him. "Dicky?"

"He's holding on, Mama," he says. He can feel it even through his own exhaustion. Wherever he is, his soulmate isn’t -- leaving -- any more. Eric is as exhausted and drained as though he fought the battle himself. He hopes that he did. If there’s a way for his soulmate to take strength from him, he hopes that he took every last drop. God knows Eric doesn’t begrudge it. Could never begrudge it. 

He smiles at her, wobbly but real. “He’s gonna live.”

"I'm glad, baby," she says, and hugs him hard. "You want breakfast? You're going to need to keep your energy up, and staying up half the night isn’t going to help that, so you come down, and we’ll get you fed, and maybe you can get a nap in before skating practice."

(Coach comes downstairs at six, and flips the tv over to his favorite sports channel. Eric and his Mama freeze when the anchor mentions a young Canadian hockey player, found late the previous night who’s in 'critical condition' in Montreal. It could just be a coincidence. It could. But Eric -- Eric takes up hockey three months later.)


	2. Chapter 2

It takes weeks before Eric feels right again. Before he'd just had a distant sense that there was someone out there for him, somewhere. Sometimes it seemed more like wishful thinking than anything real. Now: it's real.

It's exhausting.

He forces himself out of bed every day. School is hard work, but he's determined to keep his grades up, because he has to be able to leave, to get to wherever it is he needs to go. Even if his soulmate wasn't tugging at him to go find him, he'd still be planning to leave.

Some days, it's fine, and some, school feels like a dream, distant and foggy and surreal, nothing quite making sense. A couple of times teachers send him to the nurse. She, like his Mama, believes in soulmates, and lets him stay there, curled up and fully focused on something he can’t quite reach until the final bell of the day rings.

Some days, he's angry.

He's got a lot to be angry about -- he didn't want to move to Madison; he didn't want to give up figure skating -- he really didn't want to be tied will he, nil he, to someone who doesn't seem to know or care that he exists, but dumps all their worst days on him anyway, staining his dreams with inchoate terrors, and fogging his days with misery and shame.

Coach takes him home, those days. Finds him a Gatorade and some saltines. Bends a concerned look on him, sits with him, asks him how he's doing. It's a little bewildering, but it's one of the few positive points about the whole mess -- Coach seems to care more about his son (and his son's unknown soulmate) than he ever did before. 

Some nights are terrible. He'll wait, curled up in bed for the moment when the last fragile threads fray and break, dissolving into the darkness.

“What’s wrong? Let me help, please let me help--” he'll say under his breath, hoping, praying that his soulmate may hear him. “I'm here, I promise, you just have to stay, just stay.” He’s spent a lot of time since last June finding out ways to handle panic attacks and anxiety. Nothing seems to help. It's like his soulmate can't feel their connection -- or doesn’t want to.

Hockey helps. On the ice he feels free. There's no weight on his mind, just the ice and the skates and the game. And ... they feel closer.

Learning the rules was hard, and losing games hurt, and unlearning how to figure skate seemed endless and impossible, remembering to use blades without toe picks and to slam them across the ice careless of the scars and tracks he left behind. (Maybe he sort of mourns those beautiful clean traces that he used to leave, neat, clean lines without a wobble or a hint of loss of control.) But there's a satisfaction to slapping a puck into the net, in setting up a goal for someone else to take, in scraping a turn on a dime instead of spinning on the spot. And maybe he loves being captain, loves when they do well, loves hockey.

He meditates a lot. It keeps him calm. He hopes he feels calm to his soulmate, because he sometimes he's overwhelmed: feels wrung out and angry and sad and desperate. The darkness is terrible -- that awful night never fades from his memory, but hope clings, still, to the edges of his world, and he reaches out, reaches out every night, when the world is asleep, holding his hand out into the darkness.

It feels empty, but there’s something still there, he’s sure of it. Slowly, over weeks and months and years the darkness eases, his soulmate starts to reach back.

He's in his junior year at high school when he wakes one morning with reddened blotches around his right wrist. They're too wide spread to be self inflicted, and he knows what they are even before the bruises show through, a handprint, finger tips pressed desperately into his skin, and he covers it up, and touches them gently. They fade but the sense of connection doesn't.

They're holding on. He wraps his own hand around his wrist and holds on too, the bruises a promise.

Soon, he's thinking about colleges, looking at the future: who is he? Who does he want to be?  
What does he want to do when he grows up? (When will he meet his other half?)

How is he supposed to know?

He's seventeen. He's a mediocre student and a good skater. He's a baker without peer in his cohort, a hockey player (captain even, which he still doesn't quite believe). A teenager. A gay man. A blond (they don't seem to be having more fun on his watch, but there's time...)

He's half of a thing that is meant to be whole, a there and not there Schrödinger's cat of a pairing.

(He tries not to think about that too much.)

His entire future plans consist of: Find him.

(Definitely not thinking about it too much.)

Coach is the one who encourages him to apply to schools with a hockey team and a scholarship program. He's the one who insists that the tape they make includes his routines from when he was fourteen and even smaller than he is now.

"They need to see just how fast you are," he says gruffly. It opens Eric's eyes to a revelation: Coach has been paying attention, is applying his sports focussed mind to the strategies of getting his son somewhere that he will be happy.

He has let the imperfection of hockey sully the 100% football mind that he has spent twenty years or more honing. Eric doesn't say a word. His eyes catch those of his Mama, both of them wide and in total agreement that they shouldn't make any sudden moves in case they scare him away.

In return he gets a nod and a smile when the offer of a full ride to Samwell (tiny but perfectly formed, Mama says when they get home after their tour of colleges, and Coach snorts but restrains himself when they both bend a dangerous look on him) arrives.

"I knew you'd do it." he says gruffly, with something that looks strangely like pride on his face, in his voice. "Well done," he adds, and Eric is lost in bewilderment.

"Thanks, Daddy," he mumbles, and shoots him a shy (huge) smile back. This wanton display of emotion so discomfits them both that they retreat and carefully don't speak to each other except for sports, minor requests (salt, Junior,) and teasing Mama (you boys!) for nearly a week.

Which is nice, because Samwell is the college of his heart. He's not thinking about that, either. When he and Mama visited colleges (a grand tour of ten of them, New England is awful crowded, really) before he decided which ones to apply for (ain't made of money, Junior. You pick the right ones, and you pick wisely, and we'll help out), Samwell was the one where he walked onto campus and thought, yes, this. I could live here.

He can see himself, in an odd displaced day dream, dashing across the quads between lectures, skating in Faber (those windows!), learning and growing up and yes. Following his heart, here. This is the one.

It's nothing to do with the tall hockey players that had been practicing in Faber when they looked around.

Obviously.

Because no matter how hard he day dreamed, none of them looked around and met his eyes across the ice and then skated across to him. Clearly, he's been reading too many romances. That sort of nonsense doesn't happen.

And he didn't get to see if his eyes were that pale blue that's been filling his dreams for years.

Jack Zimmermann sweeps his dour gaze over the frogs and looks resigned to his fate as their captain. There isn't a hint in his face that he saw Eric at all, not as an individual. Which is a pity, because Eric saw him and thought, quite involuntarily, "Oh. Hi. Hello. It's you," which settled the question of who, but did nothing for his coiling anxiety.

It's a disappointment, he doesn't deny it. Jack doesn't recognize him. They shake hands and there's nothing there (he thinks there's something there, but maybe Jack doesn't feel it, so maybe Eric is imagining it).

He knows that bonds form or they don't. That some are flashy and some are quiet and there is no one right way to be a soulmate or have a soul bond, but he really wishes that the universe would hurry up and get Jack on board with the program. He knows that some are friends and some are lovers, and some never find each other, and some grow up together and are so close that they finish each other's sentences, which there is far far too much of in Arkansas. Or so he hears.

So maybe he does start wondering if maybe he's wrong. Because the thread that holds them together tells him that his soulmate is -- mostly happy, these days. Sometimes he sees a glint in Jack's eyes, and wonders if Jack does know. And then there's checking practice again and it's four am and he's covered in bruises, and if this is what soul mates do then he is good with never finding his. Especially if he's some kind of sadistic hockey god Canadian with too much time to chirp unassuming Southern boys.

He doesn't mean that, by the way. Universe. If you're listening.

He gets a concussion. Gets Johnson's dibs. Goes home (he doesn't break into song but it's a near run thing)

Gets to see Jack with a dazed expression, like he's the one with the concussion. Wonders if Jack knows.

(Remembers how it felt to wake in the middle of the night, bile and sand burning the back of his throat (his parents whispering behind closed doors about what it meant. He knew what it meant). Remembers the terrible yawning emptiness that had woken him, and the vast grief that stabbed through him, pinned him to the bed, barely breathing for long minutes until he came back. Until Jack came back.)

Wonders if Jack felt this. Wonders if Jack ever realized what he was doing to his unmet soul mate. (For a time there, he used to hope that he did, used to hope, viciously, bitterly, that Jack felt terrible for inflicting that on a stranger. He doesn't any more. He's grown up, grown distance, and most of all, met Jack. He's not angry any more. He hopes that it never ever occurs to Jack that his soulmate suffered right alongside him.)

He remembers what it was like to be on his own, for those scant minutes. It makes him want to curl up next to Jack and never leave, just stay and watch him breathe in case the next breath is the last one. Again.

But he goes home, lets Jack stew. (Or not. Maybe he's wrong. One sided bonds happen. Or maybe it's really someone else entirely. Mistakes happen. Maybe he's not bonded at all, just... attached to the idea of being attached. He is self aware enough to grudgingly allow that might be the case. (So. Much. Therapy.))

But Jack doesn't visit him, doesn't talk to him, doesn't call. He gets a couple of texts that might as well be from Hall or Murray -- is he resting, is he sleeping, will he be fit to be on the team... It's not a lot for a boy in love. So if that summer is when he starts being a jerk, he feels pretty okay with that. He's put up with a lot.

And by being a jerk, he means waiting for a quiet weekday afternoon (he has a job but works weekends. It means he barely sees his parents, which at this juncture is a grace and a blessing and not an accident even slightly) (He loves them. And he loves them so much more at a distance than right on top of him and full of questions).

And then he plays.

He has a tiny soft butt plug (with a tiny not at all soft bullet inside it) and he teases himself with it some days. Rolls it gently over his dick (not the tip, too much) presses it under his balls until his eyes roll back in his head, strokes it lightly over his taint, breathing hard, his hips lifting, desperately biting his lips closed because his parents are out but the neighbours aren't.

Slides it in and out of himself, slicking his cock with one hand and his hole with the other. The coordination takes practice but he gets there. Practice can be fun, Jack, he thinks as he jerks off, furiously. Isn't this fun? Maybe he's not over the 4am checking practice.

He imagines it's all real. Lets himself believe that they are connected. That Jack is in this with him, feels Eric's emotions, his dreams and his fears. If he feels Bitty jerking off, the arousal leaking through, echoing in his own body. He imagines Jack's cock rising involuntarily while he's on the ice or in the gym under his jock, hopes that he too feels, at a distance, the gentle pressure on his hole and the way that Bitty slips a finger in and out slowly.

It stays imaginary -- both real and not real for weeks.

And then, it's real. He's been dragged to church by his parents, is sitting demurely, songbook in his lap, listening politely to the sermon (which he remembers absolutely nothing of because someone, somewhere was playing with his dick, fondling his balls, slipping a thick finger into his ass and pressing up unerringly on his prostate.

He comes in his best pants trying desperately to look like he's ecstatic with the Holy Spirit and not with the feel of phantom fingers pressing into him and a strong hand stripping fiercely (tenderly) down his cock.

(Moomaw hadn't even been at the service, and still phoned him not twenty minutes after they got home and lectured him in delicate but terribly precise and unmistakable terms about Appropriate Behaviour in the Lord's House, and Young Love, and how Following Your Heart sometimes Meant Finding Your Balls, and the truly horrifying remark about pointers and hound dogs that he will try to forget until his dying day, and the terrible old lady cackle of glee as he slunk away leaving Mama to chastise her (and laugh, he heard that too, and won't be forgetting any time soon, you traitor).

Jack doesn't text him. Bitty doesn't text Jack. He opens the app, tries typing out a message, but what could he say? What if he's wrong? What if he accuses Jack of revenge jerking off and Jack has no idea what he's talking about? There's no coming back from that. His certainty cannot withstand his fear of being wrong, of breaking his own heart, because even if Jack isn't his soulmate, he wants him to be, so much.)

None of which does anything to stop him from take a long lazy jerkoff session two afternoons later. The team group chat is quiet. Jack is probably still at camp with -- some prospect or other. He'll most likely be on the ice and this serves him right.

Eric plays with his balls for what feels like hours, until they are achy and over-sensitive. He adds more and more lube to his fingers (stretching himself out) (smoothing down his dick) until the bed is kind of squelchy gross, but he doesn't care.

Distantly he can feel that Jack likes it (he does know, he's just afraid). He cups his balls, rolls them gently. Squeezes and tugs lightly whenever anyone feels like they might come. Strokes slow fingers down his shaft, trailing them up, lightly scraping his fingernails over the hypersensitive skin on the way down, one by one. But he's not on his own in this. Not this time.

There's a distant echo of another hand, a hand warm and heavy on his dick, its grip unfamiliar (familiar), slick and tight.

He takes in a sharp breath. Feels Jack's lungs expand in tandem with him, his chest moves, his lips curve up into a smile. Jack's right there with him. They fall into synchrony as easily as they do on the ice, and there are no limits on this. They aren't one upping each other any more. They're pushing each other, lifting each other, right there. Together.

His hips jerk hard -- he doesn't know if that's him or Jack, and a moment later, his hips lift high and he feels a finger pressing under his balls. He cries out, and Jack tugs firmly on his balls, holding him from coming and he wails.

It was one thing to tease Jack, but now he's doing it back, and the feedback loop -- engulfs them. They play with touches, a pinch to Bitty's nipples, a slow finger in Jack's ass, and they both feel it, thousands of miles apart and connected in an instant haptic feedback loop that just winds then both tighter and tighter.

And then there's a moment where they stop and Bitty's hand is on his dick and he's just jerking off, and he knows, knows Jack is doing the same and he wants to kiss him, so badly, and when he comes (finally allowed to come) they do it together, and he knows that Jack hears Bitty say his name, as clearly as Bitty hears Jack.

"Bitty!" is still ringing in his ears when his phone chimes insistently.

He picks up.

"You're an asshole," Jack says straight into his ear, breathless and warm, and Bitty laughs, happy beyond his ability to articulate it. The words don't matter, because this is real. This is happening, and Bitty can feel the smile on Jack's face. Can feel the warmth of affection and heat and want enveloping him.

"So are you," Eric says easily, happily. "I was in *church*!" Jack snorts and can't stop laughing which pretty much ruins the "Sorry" he tries to choke out. Bitty waits. And then, "Hey, Jack?"

"Bitty?" He sounds a little wary. He shouldn't, but he'll get used to it, Bitty thinks.

"Love you."

Jack laughs. "Love you too, you bastard."


End file.
